A static site generator is a program that takes content, webpage design templates and configuration files and based on them generates a directory tree of HTML and other files that represent a website. The resulting website is static in the sense that it does not require CGI or other server-side scripts to serve its content and could as well be distributed as a ZIP file with no HTTP server at all. The content that a static site generator processes into HTML is usually marked up with a lightweight markup language like Markdown.

One popular modern example of a static site generator would be Jekyll. It is written in Ruby.